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Enbridge allowed to go ahead in Canada

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Warrior Publications has a blog up on the ruling that it’s okay to allow a repeat offender access to its victims…

Part of the problem with the conditions set is that even though Enbridge must carry $950 million in insurance…one cannot replace what is lost with…money.  You can’t eat money. You can’t breathe money.  You can’t drink money.  It won’t make a bit of difference if you have billions upon billions of dollars if you are made ill by breathing particulate, eating food grown in polluted soil, or trying to cleanse your kidneys and liver with petrochemically poisoned water.

 

 

Why won’t public schools just go away already?

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(said very snarkily)

Jan Ressenger has this up on the recent nominee to the Dept of Education.  Yeah, if you were hoping that President Obama had somehow seen the light about the U.S. education fiasco, well, you (and I) were sadly mistaken, because he’ s nominated another corporate takeover twerp.

Be sure to click on the link to the Nation’s report:

In addition, [Ted]  Mitchell serves as an adviser to Salmon River Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in education companies. Mitchell sits on the board of Parchment, an academic transcript start-up that is among Salmon River Capital’s portfolio. Salmon River Capital helped create one of the biggest names in for-profit secondary education, Capella University.

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Italics mine.

That, my friends, should read as a rap sheet.

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In other Education News, School Matters has this blog on the lack of transparency for the State of Indiana….so what else is new?

I agree that individuals should probably not be named, but there absolutely needs to be an accounting of how many students went to school B, and how much money was diverted from School A.

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School Finance 101 has a good report on the lies and statistics of mis-edumucation.  One can make statistics say anything you want, if you know how to skew the data…or leave out the data that doesn’t agree with your goals.

African Soul Fried Rice

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Michael Twitty has done it again with this blog on African Soul Fried Rice.  Sounds delicious.

I like the fermented aspect of the food.  I wondered if he means the bean from the locust tree…so I went looking and found this.

It’s considered medicinal, too….gotta wonder how much wisdom has been lost about our ancient remedies.  Thanks, modern medicine, for a bang up job of ignoring past wisdom. /snarky, for sure.

The locust beans are seen as a nuisance here…as is the dandelion.  We’ll discover, when it’s too late, that the things we thought were nuisances were healing plants to cure cancer, diabetes, etc.

Michael Twitty also has a blog up on some badass rice growers.  Yes, badass rice growers.  I *love* that they are bucking the system, the status quo of  Big Ag and getting the cold shoulder for it.  They are raising rice crops in unconventional ways that thwart the Ag profiteers who want to sell chemicals and bioengineered rice.  Heh.

On top of that, the way that they are raising it lowers the arsenic level in rice–very important to lower our exposure to heavy metals.

From the Washington Post article:

Thomet has unwittingly aligned himself with a small group of experimental U.S. farmers and hobbyists, probably no more than 50, who are breaking with a tradition that dates to colonial America. They’re rejecting paddy rice in favor of an increasingly accepted agricultural system that promises to increase crop yields while decreasing water use, chemical dependency and even the amount of arsenic in our grains.

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See, it bothers the status quo when you don’t play along with the technology-is-king mentality.  Using one’s brain is not allowed. :p

 

Dying for a living

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A young woman collapsed into a coma after working 30 hours straight.  She later died.  She apparently was drinking the Thai equivalent to redbull to stay awake on the job.

The NY Daily News has a good write up on her hectic life.

It just emphasizes that health is precarious at best.  We need sleep, not energy drinks designed to thwart the body’s mechanisms for rest, in order to fulfill impossible demands.

Dying for a living…

 

Can You Hear Me Now? **edited

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A self-fulfilling prophecy by AT&T.

This article must have been written by AT&T….or perhaps it’s *cough* nooz placed by their PR dept.

AT&T has failed to maintain the land lines in a way that we were accustomed to before the push for cell phones.

This article barely touches on the problems rural folks would face if land lines are phased out.  The service where I’m at is spotty at best.  It is in no way as reliable as land lines are.  I’ve wondered how many calls I’ve missed.  What if an employer tried to call for an interview and kept getting “service not available”?

The elephant in the room that the article fails to mention is the devastating effects of Electro-Magnetic Fields (EMF) on people.    As I’ve stated before, mercury poisoned folk are especially sensitive to them.  When I was really sick, I could not talk on a cell phone for any length of time without getting a migraine the next day.  I can now talk on them for longer periods, but knowing how it impacts me, why would I want to risk that exposure?

Mercola has an article on it here.

Links from the references —

Effects of EMF on rat brains

Cell phone effects on the young.

Europeans take stance on EMF technology.

The truth about wireless technologies.

Cell phones affect neuological and behavioral aspects of mice.

**edited to correct glaring spelling error. Stupid dyslexia.

We will not obey TPP

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Wisconsin, bless their little hearts, have drafted a resolution that they are a “TPP-free” zone.  The negotiations have been shielded from public scrutiny but the article states that bits have leaked out and…it’s scary as hell–a Monsanto lobbyist is leading the negotiations.

From the article:

Countries, including those in the European Union, could also find it increasingly difficult to ban, or even require the labeling of, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) if biotech companies determine that those countries’ strict policies restrict fair trade and infringe on the companies’ “rights” to profit.

To top it off, corporations would be allowed to resolve trade disputes in special international tribunals, effectively wiping out hundreds of domestic and international food sovereignty laws. Products labeled fair trade, organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, or GMO-free, could all be challenged as “barriers to trade.”

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It’s an attack on local autonomy….the right to decide what is best for your community.Good Grief, these corporations can.not.get.enough.profits.  Greed, greed, greed.

 

Larry Lujack

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Those of you not from the Midwest won’t get this post, but an icon of the 70s has passed–Larry Lujack who dominated the radio during the 70s, has passed.   We lived three hours away from Chicago, but the powerful WLS reached our little town and much of northern Indiana. (There is a great youtube of Lujack broadcasting in May 1971.  I don’t think it’s “official” , though, so I can’t link to it.  But just listening to it is a great toss back to those days–the fun we had (describing oil cans as “beautiful” *snort* ) and the times–Vietnam updates /protestors are featured on the news and I’m not sure, but I think they are announcing officers being investigated for shooting Vietnamese, but I’m not sure if it’s related to the My Lai massacre.)

We loved listening to Lujack on our school bus as we made the trip into school, laughing at programs like the “Tooth Fairy”…complete with background noise like doors opening/closing, footsteps, and all that made radio great.  I feel sorry for my kids’ generation, because they never got to experience that part of our culture.

I had the name “boogiecheck” for awhile as a log on name.  People thought it was something dirty–it wasn’t.  It was in reference to a program on WLS with John Records Landecker, where he made short bits of callers’ conversations into a hilarious soundbyte.   The program was so popular that when Landecker went to a local high school to speak at a convocation, he was greeted with the crowd chanting:  “Boogie Check, Boogie Check, ooh aah!  Boogie Check, Boogie Check, ooh aah!”   This was the intro to the program from that moment on.

Landecker once told a story of one Friday, a payday, in the olden days where they actually handed out paper checks that one took to the bank to deposit.  He said he picked up his check, and started to walk towards the bank, and with each step, he felt more tired.  His arm hurt.  By the time he got to the bank, he could barely put one foot in front of another.  When he got to the bank teller, he found the reason why:  he was carrying Larry Lujack’s paycheck instead of his own.  Haha.  Must have been soooome big ole’ paycheck. 🙂

Peace and comfort to Larry’s family on his passing…

The Gift

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Okay, so this is a rough time of year if one is poor…and it is especially hard for children.

I am more keenly aware of that and try to counteract it by asking kids what kind of gifts they could give without it costing money…

One said that they could cook a meal for someone (provided they furnished their own ingredients).  Another said you could pick up trash for someone.  I suggested that they could shovel snow for someone in their neighborhood–perhaps an elderly person, as a gift.

I asked if they knew about “Pay It Forward”…they did.   We talked about the people paying it forward for customers at fast food restaurants.  I mentioned the movie, but warned them that the movie had a sad ending…half wanted to know what happened and the other half didn’t want me to tell.

I related a story I had read once where a couple had purchased a brand new car.  It was their pride and joy and they took good care of it over the years.  The husband died, however, and as the lady got older, the car was too much for her to care for it.  One night, a couple of boys from the neighborhood waited until the older lady went to bed, and then they washed the car and cleaned it all up until it gleamed.  The boys continued to do this over the years.  The lady didn’t know who her little car angels were, but she was grateful.

I told the kids they could wash a car as a gift, too.  (Of course, this would have to wait until better weather.)

And as I sit here and type, I can think of so many everyday things that could be gifts that don’t cost a thing.

I think it’s important for the poor not to feel they have nothing to contribute…that they can give gifts, too, that are just as appreciated as something bought in a store.

Framing the news

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Look at this segment on ABC News on the ruling that what the NSA is doing is Unconstitutional.

Just the wording alone is alarmist:

CIA Spy Ruling Could Be a Major Setback for the War on Terror

(sorry for the large type)

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The segment states that this is a victory for Edward Snowden. (!)

Wow.  Just wow.  Journalists…er, um, people who get a paycheck pretending to be journalists…who didn’t do their job in the first place, making it imperative for someone else–in this case Edward Snowden–to do what they should have been doing are putting this as a victory for him.

Instead, they should be saying this is a victory for our democracy.

This is a victory for upholding our Constitution.

They frame it as a blow to the war on terror when, as the judge states, there is no evidence that this has saved lives.

And eavesdropping on friendly countries…? How is that helping the war on terror?  Is Angela Merkel a terrorist?

 

Boiling the frog…

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Idle No More has a virtual “teach-in” up on the web (scroll down) by Sharon Venne.   It’s a really interesting piece on the historical treatment of the indigenous and how s-l-o-w-l-y their culture and their land has been “disappeared”.

As she says in her talk, it goes on over such a slow period of time, that one doesn’t realize what is happening until it’s almost too late….like the frog put in a pan of water that the heat is turned up so slowly that the frog doesn’t realize it’s being boiled to death.

It’s really worth watching it all the way through–she has such a good story to tell of her own struggle to get an education.  She tells the story of not being able to read until going to university.  (By the way, Literacy Volunteers are out there to help folks learn to read–check with your local library). She was continually kept in stress mode by them not sending her monthly stipends on time so she could pay her rent.  God Bless the administrator who helped her.

She makes an important point at about 29:00 minutes in– of what sounds like the precursor to “corporations are people, too”.  If anything, we need to pay better attention to what is going on in other countries…especially to the poor and minorities…because it seems to be a worldwide power grab–given that there have been austerity measures all over the globe and attacks on teacher’s unions and such.  More here.

And here.